The company explained that ‘improvement in its technology interface’ has led to a ‘reduction in support-related queries’, thus making several roles redundant

In what is seen as another sign crisis engulfing service sector, online food delivery and restaurant discovery platform Zomato has fired 540 employees across customer support teams.

According to a report published in the business newspaper ‘Mint’, this is the largest round of firing at the food aggregator, followed by a layoff in the last month when 60 employees were asked to go.

As per the report, Zomato laid off 540 employees at the company’s head office in Gurugram across its customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams.

“Today, we let go of 541 people (or 10% of Zomato’s strength) across these support teams — based out of our offices in Gurgaon,” the company was quoted as saying by the Mint.

It is being said that the company has laid off in order to “reduce redundancies in back-end support roles”.

The company, that has been in the news over some controversies, tried to explain its decision thus: “Improvement in its technology interface across functions has led to a reduction in support-related queries; this has led to several roles becoming redundant.”

As per the report, in this year only, layoffs at Zomato affected 600 people across customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams.

After layoffs, the company’s employee strength is an estimated 5,000 people across the organisation (including international markets).

Founded in 2008 as a restaurant discovery and review platform, Zomato has expanded to 24 countries and services 10,000 cities globally. In India, it provides services 500 cities.